I will share new products that I find to help our families affected with Autism and news stories that I find interesting.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Why Autism Speaks Doesn't Speak For Me

Autism Speaks, founded in 2005 by Bob and Suzanne Wright, sometimes
seems to have taken over the entire conversation about autism in this
country, what with their blue puzzle pieces littered all

over the
landscape, coming to symbolize, wrongly, autism itself. Yet in spite of
their ostensible role as a voice for autism, they’ve got a poor track
record of showing respect for autistic people. One example is their
intensely offensive “I am autism”
video from 2009, promising a threatening, ominous autism that “ knows
where you live” and “works faster than pediatric AIDS, cancer, and
diabetes combined.” Oh, and guaranteeing also that autism will make your
marriage fail. It doesn’t.

But that little fact and any number of others didn’t get in the way
of Suzanne Wright when she settled in to pen her organization’s recent “call to action”
on autism, this time switching pronouns to assert repeatedly in
boldface, “ This is autism.” She claims that the country has failed
autism families, “let them split up.” According to Ms. Wright, families
who have autistic children are “not living.” Except that, almost in the
same breath, evidently we are living.

She compares the “3 million children” in the United States with
autism–of whom one is presumably my son–to a crisis on the level of 3
million children suddenly going missing or 3 million children waking up
all on the same day, gravely ill. We would, she says, call out all of
the military to resolve this problem, it is so dire, so why do we not do
that for autism? It’s not the first time someone has compared autism to
having a child stolen from them or to a dire disease. From what I hear
from people who have, in fact, actually lost a child to a disease, there
is no comparison.